Getting Enough Sleep Is Crucial for Kids But Hard for Families

Ever since my oldest, now almost five years old, was small, I've wondered if she is getting enough sleep. She fought naps and bedtime when she was a baby, and when she was a toddler, she refused to nap until she was so over tired that she started experiencing night terrors. So when Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, published a study this week about sleep in young children, I was eager to read the results.

The study only included 34 kids, but the researchers felt that their results were so universal that they needed to be published anyway. The researchers looked at kids 7 to 11 years old and examined what happened when they got more and less sleep. How did this affect their performance at school? Were they able to focus better and be less disruptive in class? The answer was, unequivocally, yes. Even getting an extra half-hour of shut-eye meant that the kids were more alert and better able to face the challenges of school, while losing even a hour of sleep caused them to be much less alert, and much more moody.

The National Sleep Foundation says that preschoolers on average need about 11 to 13 hours of sleep, and that young school aged children need ten to ten 11 hours. Assuming that kids need to get up at about 6:30 a.m. to be ready for school, a time that seems fairly universal among my friends, that would mean a bedtime of about 7:30 p.m. — and even that means that kids go to sleep as soon as they're in bed. I know that's not the case for my kids.

For me to be comfortable sending the kids to bed at 7:30, we would have to have dinner around 6 p.m. — which, quite frankly, is when we're usually all just settling in from getting home from work and school. Often, dinner doesn't make the table until 7 p.m. or so, and then we have time to unwind, baths, and stories. We're managing to have the kids in bed by 8:30 p.m. most nights, at this point, but we haven't added homework or any school activities to the equation yet. I'm worried about what will happen when we do.

Do you think that your kids are getting enough sleep? Tell us below in the comments section!

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Kristine Croto

Kristine Croto is a mom raising two kids in small(ish) town in Vermont. With an eye towards attachment parenting practices, but an ultimate belief that whatever stops the crying and doesn't break the kiddos is the way to go, she tries to walk the walk half as well as she talks the talk on Ravelry.com's parenting forums.

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